Everybody Looks At Me

I go to the supermarket and everybody looks at me. I get on the Tube and everybody looks at me. I get off the Tube and everybody looks at me. Everybody looks at me.

This might be because everybody thinks I’m supremely beautiful. However, it’s more probable that everybody is wondering what the hell I’m doing. When I’m out and about, I talk to myself, swear to myself, and hit myself. I click my tongue, smack my lips, blow kisses, and shout out the most random words (the Roman Emperor Caligula got a high-volume mention yesterday).

It’s no wonder people stare. Tourette’s is an odd thing, and people like to stare at odd things. Unfortunately for me, my tics are often at their oddest and loudest in public. Also unfortunately for me, a lot of people don’t get what Tourette’s is. This means that I can be slapping my face or cursing at a chicken salad and many people will assume that I am doing this voluntarily. However, all my tics are things I do not want to do. They are automatic, involuntary, meaningless.

Although staring might also be automatic and involuntary, staring at someone certainly isn’t meaningless. Staring at someone is telling them that they look odd, that they are behaving differently, that they are an anomaly.

Being an anomaly at the centre of attention can be a pretty embarrassing place to be. It certainly was at the start of my Tourette’s. By now though, I’m so used to saying all manner of weird things in front of large crowds that I’m pretty used to the unwanted attention. Happily, soon after developing Tourette’s, I came to accept the stares by either a) ignoring them (you can get used to anything), b) staring back (this makes people fantastically uncomfortable), or c) saying hi to anyone who is staring (this one really freaks people out).

It also helps me to see the big picture. I live in London, a city of a gazillion odd people, me included. Every day, we all walk past anomalies like me talking to themselves, swearing to themselves, and hitting themselves. We turn to them, we look at them, and we stare at them. Then what we do is look away, forget that they ever existed and move on with our lives.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you shout “Caligula!” when you cross the road. In this city of nearly nine million people, everybody might be looking at me, but everybody is just a little bit too busy to care.